By Dr. Bjorn Mercer
Program Director, Communication, Humanities, Music, Philosophy, Religion and World Languages Programs, American Public University
This article is Part I of a six-part series on the popularity of classical music.
Classical music is littered with geniuses, composers of immense abilities who changed or perfected the music of their time. From Bach to Beethoven, Wagner to Verdi, and Copland to Shostakovich, there are numerous amazing composers from every country and every time period.
But no matter where you are in the world, the standard classical repertory has been set for decades. As famed American music critic and composer Virgil Thomson said in 1939 speaking of the symphonic repertory, “From Tokyo to Lisbon, from Tel-Aviv to Seattle, ninety percent of it is the same fifty pieces. The other 10 is usually devoted to good-will performances of works by local celebrities. All the rest is standardized.”
This standardization of the orchestral repertory, that is the same composers and pieces being played all around the world no matter where you are, has been set since the early 20th century. If you look at bachtrack, a website that tracks classical music performances all around the world, you can easily see standardization in its yearly music statistics.
Bachtrack tries to track as many concerts in the world as possible and in 2015, it listed 27,500 concerts and in 2019, and it listed 35,000 concerts (it will be interesting to see how many concerts occurred in 2020 because of COVID-19). With such a large dataset to work with the website has a pretty good idea of who and what is popular in classical music.
When you look at the yearly stats that bachtrack publishes, the same names generally appear on the top 10 list of composers played worldwide. Seven composers appear on each of the lists from 2015 to 2019. Below are the names of the composers with their average ranking placement:
● Ludwig van Beethoven (1.4)
● Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1.6)
● Johann Sebastian Bach (3.2)
● Johannes Brahms (4.6)
● Franz Schubert (5.8)
● Pyotr Tchaikovsky (6.4)
● Robert Schumann (8.2)
In addition, several composers appeared a few times, mainly near the bottom with five composers appearing just once. These include George Frederic Handel (three appearances), Maurice Ravel and Franz Joseph Haydn (two appearances each), and Jean Sibelius, Frederick Chopin, Claude Debussy, Felix Mendelssohn, and Leonard Bernstein (one appearance each). Ideally, the top 50 composers would be analyzed with their average placement, and the number of times their works were performed, but bachtrack does not publish their raw statistics.
If you look at the top 10 composers over the past five years, you will see all of the great composers of Western classical music history: Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. After the “Big Three,” you get Brahms and Tchaikovsky, two great symphonists. The rest of the composers are famous, but not as famous as those five, especially for non-classical music lovers. An astounding note from the 2019 statistics was “Over 13% of all classical concerts feature a work by Beethoven.”
In addition to the appearance of the same composers, just a few countries of origin dominate the standard repertory. Again, from bachtrack’s stats of 2016 to 2019, the following countries are represented most often based on the most commonly performed composers.
I included Mozart, Haydn and Schubert, who are considered Austrian today as Germanic composers. The “Other” category includes Sibelius (Finnish), Chopin (Polish) and Bernstein (American).
This means that 78% of the top composers who are played most often in the world are Germanic. In addition, Bernstein appeared in the top 10 for 2018 only because it was his birth centenary (nothing against Bernstein, but he is never in the world’s top 10).
Musical Productivity Today Is Far Less Than That of the Past
Composers today, for the most part, do not write hundreds and hundreds of compositions as many did in the past (with the exception of someone like Alan Hovannes, who wrote more than 400 works). To start, contemporary composers must spend a great deal of time “finding” their style; learning how to write music that they feel communicates their ideas through their work versus the past when composers simply wrote in the style of the time.
Writing in the style of the time lasted well into the early 20th century and only the composer on the bachtrack list who truly had to find his own style was Bernstein (born 1918). Ravel, Debussy and Sibelius all were born in the late 19th century. Although they found a style that was unique to them, their styles matured when truly having your own style was not yet a choice.
Most of the top seven composers were extremely productive, especially those before the Romantic era (1815–1910). Bach wrote around 1,128 works in 75 years; Beethoven wrote around 773 works in 56 years; Mozart wrote around 600 works in just 35 years.
In addition, many of them wrote for numerous genres such as symphonies, chamber works, works for solo keyboard (organ, piano, and harpsichord), concertos, masses, cantatas, and the like. This means that large symphonies play Mozart and Beethoven while smaller chamber concerts and solo recitals also regularly play Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach because of their overall musical productivity.
Other Composers
With all of the composers listed above, there are a dozen others who are quite famous but who are not in the top 10 list. Composers who are surprisingly not on any of the top 10 bachtrack lists for the past few years include Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Monteverdi, Ottorino Respighi, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Igor Stravinsky, Dimitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, Richard Strauss and John Williams. In addition, there are another dozen or so who could be listed who are equally popular and equally brilliant.
When looking at the top bachtrack lists, top contemporary composers who are alive are all absent. If you look at the 2019 bachtrack list, it includes a separate list of top living composers such as John Williams, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich.
After the most played contemporary composers, the first woman on the top contemporary composers list is Cecilia McDowall at number 19. There are 13 women in the top 50 contemporary composers, meaning around 26% of the top contemporary composers performed in the world are women. In some ways, that is good but it is not 50%.
This brings up an important conversation about representation. Western classical music originated in Italy, Germany, France and all around the continent. The music was then exported to various countries that were either founded by Europeans, such as the U.S. and Australia, or exported to countries that were colonized or greatly influenced by Western nations.
Although Western classical music is just music, it greatly intersects with Western Europe’s difficult colonial past. For many years, classical music was considered the pinnacle of Western musical achievement, so it must do a better job of including diverse voices.
In the next article in the series “Popular Classical Music,” we will delve into the financial numbers of Western classical music in the U.S. and other countries.
About the Author
Dr. Bjorn Mercer is a Program Director. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Missouri State University, a master’s and doctorate in music from the University of Arizona, and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He writes about culture, leadership, and why the humanities and liberal arts are critical to career success. Dr. Mercer also writes children’s music.
